Quote:
Originally Posted by Tobra
I have NEVER seen prayer have a negative impact, and cannot imagine how it could. I have, on many, many occasions, observed a positive effect. I can think of a dozen off the top of my head that I performed surgery on myself.
You contradict yourself in your own post, first it does nothing, then it makes for worse outcomes.
I am relating my own observations, personal experiences. As I stated above.
I think it is funny how absolutely certain people are about things that they can never prove one way or the other. If I see something happen myself, I tend to believe it is possible.
Perhaps someday, I will be as smart as you guys, but hopefully not.  |
Did you think I meant prayer had a negative impact when I said “I can think of thousands or even millions of individuals who prayed for a successful outcome to a surgery that had a low chance of success, but the surgery failed, and they died?” That is not what I meant. I meant that the prayer had no effect at all.
I’m sure you have seen what you say you’ve seen: patients with a low probability of success pray, and then success occurs. Your mind latches onto these patients because that is what you want to believe. You are conveniently forgetting those who pray for success but success never occurs and those who do not pray (atheists) but for whom success does actually occur.
To show that prayer has an effect, you’d have to perform the same surgery with the same probability of success on some large number of people, and have half of them pray and the other half not pray. Then, there would have to be a statistical difference between the group that prayed and the group that did not.
Have you done this in your practice? If not, then you are one of those people who are certain about something that you cannot prove one way or the other.